Adolf Hitler's Terror

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler played a large role in the history of Germany and what he did in his time or rule. By the mid-1933 only one party existed in Germany, the party of Adolf Hitler (pg 249). Hitler wanted a totalitarian dictatorship, but one cannot firmly be established until it also controls the minds of the people. The first people who were forced into concentration camps were liberal, democratic, and socialist intellectuals and artists. Their books were publically burned, their paintings or music declared “un-German” and attacked as “degenerate” (pg 251-52). What Adolf Hitler was trying to do was get rid of anyone who could possibly pursued the people of Germany, or produce anything, that could speak out against him and make people not want to follow what he was trying to create. However, resistance increased within the Roman Catholic Church as news spread of the Nazis’ euthanasia plans, reaching its heights with issuance of the papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (With deep anxiety) in 1937 (pg 253).

In Adolf Hitler’s mind, there was an inferior race, and that race was the Jews.  The National Socialists had no difficulty in identifying a group to occupy the position of outsider, given Europe’s thousand-year tradition in this respect: It was the Jews (pg 254). The remaining rights of Jews were greatly reduced with the proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws on September 15, 1935, which made proof of Aryan decent a prerequisite for exercising the rights of citizens or holding elective office; they deprived Jews of full citizenship, and prohibited marriage between Jews and non-Jews (pg 256).

 Hitler wanted to work on destroying all of the Jews that were in Europe. Some Countries were hit with a devastating blow because of Hitler. Poland for example had 90%, or 3,000,000 Jews, exterminated. Yugoslavia’s and Greece’s Jewish population was also diminished greatly by Hitler’s attacks, losing 81% of their Jewish population (map on pg 268). It is shocking to learn just what percentage of Jewish people was exterminated in all of these different countries in Europe. In total, ten different countries were affected by what Hitler was doing to all of the Jews.  The only country that was not affected at all was Bulgaria. There can also be the questions raised, if at some points, people who were not Jewish were mistaken for people who were and were taken to the concentration camps.

Map of Concentration Camps
 during Hitler's time

 Another shocking map to look at is the one that shows the main concentration camps, death camps and other camps, outposts, and forced labor camps that were being used at this time. Looking at the map, it is amazing to see that there were nine main camps out of the fourteen, that were running, were located all throughout Germany. All of the death camps were located in Poland, along with one main camp. Even though Hitler began this in Germany it makes sense that the death camps were located in Poland because that was the first place that he went and cleared out of the Jewish people. All of these different sorts of camps were located in Germany, Poland, Sudetenland, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, France, Netherlands, and Lithuania (map on 269-69). Hitler was effecting the population of these countries dramatically besides for a couple of them where there was only a one percent difference, but that was still taking people out of that country for being a certain race.

The star that all the Jewish people had to
wear to identify themselves

 It seems impossible to get rid of this many people but Adolf Hitler managed to do it. His war was not a battle for hegemony of the type Europe had known from time immemorial; it was a racial war. As soon as Poland was conquered, the Germans had begun rounding up millions of Jews and confining them to ghettos in the major Polish cities, just as they had earlier compelled Jews within their own country to wear identifying badges (pg 273). The Jewish people were being pointed out and led away from the countries that they had grown up in and called home. Because of their race they were being treated differently and badly.